Like No Other by Una LaMarche Page A

passes it to Rose. “Please,” he continues, making the word sound hard and impatient, the opposite of polite. “Have some bread, at least. You have to eat for your milk to come in.”
    Rose cringes but takes the food silently and holds it in her lap.
    “Good girl,” my father says gently. But I wonder if he can see what I see. I wonder if any of them do. Rose might be being “good,” but she’s not being
Rose
. My sister has always been the quiet one during big family gatherings, but this is different, and scary. It’s like she’s empty.
    I study my mother’s face in the flickering candlelight. Her stone-colored eyes are big and bright behind her glasses, her smile easy and genuine as she gazes proudly at my dad and around the table at the big family she’d always wanted after growing up one of only two daughters (I once asked her why Grandma Deborah never had more children, but my mother just bristled and told me it was no one’s business but Grandma’s and G-d’s). Obviously I didn’t know my mother before she was married, so I don’t know if a switch flipped in her; if a light went out, like it seems Rose’s has. She has always been charismatic and commanding and intolerant of what she calls
blote
, which translates roughly from Yiddish as bullshit. But one of the cruelties of teenagehood is that you’ll never know what your parents were really like at your age, and they’ll never accurately remember—not enough to empathize, anyway . . . maybe just enough for pity.
    “Where is the baby sleeping?” Miri pipes up, and we all look to Rose, bracing ourselves for her to lose it completely, but amazingly, she comes to life, laughing as she wipes the tears from the corners of her eyes with her wrist.
    “She’s in an incubator,
tsigele
,” Rose says. The Yiddish word for “baby goat” has been our nickname for Miri since she came home from the hospital colicky and brayed like livestock for six months straight.
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s a little bed that keeps her warm and protected until she’s big enough to go outside.”
    Miri smiles and takes a bite of chicken, seeming happy with this answer, and Rose pops the challah into her mouth, reaching for another piece. My mother and father exchange a glance of relief.
    “If you ask me,” Jacob says—though clearly, no one has—“she could have come home today. She’s a good size for a preemie, she’s breathing on her own, she’s eating . . . Keeping her ‘for observation’ is just an excuse for them to take more of our money. Why should we trust that doctor? She’s not
our
doctor.” He doesn’t mean Dr. MacManus wasn’t Rose’s prenatal ob-gyn; I can tell he means that she’s not one of us. Not a Chabadnik. Translation: not to be trusted.
    Rose’s face crumples again, and my mother rushes to comfort her.
    “She was very respectful,” I say. “Wasn’t she, Rose?” Jacob glares at me.
    “She was fine,” Rose says quietly, dabbing her eyes with a napkin.
    “Exactly!” Jacob cries, banging his fist on the table and almost upending Isaac’s wine. “
Fine
. We shouldn’t pay eight thousand dollars for fine.”
    “Jacob,” my father warns in a deep and weary voice. Money and business are not discussed on Shabbos.
    “Rivka’s friend just had a baby,” Niv says. “She used a midwife from Park Slope. They had a home birth, right in the living room.”
    On my right, Rivka takes a break from slowly and methodically picking the crispy top bits off her square of kugel and nods politely. She’s very nice but doesn’t talk much; Niv tends to speak for her, presumably because of her accent—Rivka’s family moved to Brooklyn from Ukraine when she was fourteen. Her grandfather is a rabbi there, which impressed my parents when Niv was looking for a bride. But I wonder what Rivka was looking for in a husband. My middle brother is fine as brothers go—a bit bossy and juvenile but not cold like Jacob or oblivious like